About the time President Obama was goofing it up at Google, he was also approving a fairly dramatic escalation in America’s involvement in Libya by agreeing to utilize armed Predator Drones to rain fire down on Mohamar Gaddafi’s forces.

If future historians look back on the ruins of the American economy after a U.S. bond crisis struck in the second decade of the 21st century, many causes will be noted. Obviously, it will be seen that for decades before the catastrophe, the U.S. was spending vastly more than it could afford on government health and retirement programs.

To succeed in America – to truly succeed in America – you have to be more than excellent at what you do; you have to be a carnival barker making certain that every single person in each of the 50 states knows that you are excellent at what you do.

There has been a lot of braying and bleating from the President to the leaders in Congress about the significance of this most-recently passed budget agreement that averted the shutdown of the federal government yesterday.

The deal to head off a government shutdown Friday night got done because a guy named Barry Jackson said it was done. Not one second before.

I have no – zero – inside info on what in the press world is known as a “tick-tock” who said what to whom, and when they said it. I am not one of Barry Jackson’s pals. I’m not even sure who they might be.

But, I have known Barry Jackson for about 15 years and I know this: He has the ability to focus in on a problem not like a laser – that would be too diffused; but like the beam of sub-atomic matter zooming around a particle accelerator.

We need a new way of keeping score when it comes to government spending. The only test is: How much did we spend on a program last year and how much more (or, rarely, less) are we spending this year.

There is no mention of whether the program in question is working well, badly, or not at all. There is no consideration of whether there is a more efficient way to deliver whatever services or goods are involved in the program.

President Obama emailed his supporters that he is running for re-election. I guess he did that as a way to tell young voters (who largely powered his initial election campaign) that he is still with them.

As anybody who ever watched Schoolhouse Rock in the 1970’s knows (“I am just a bill, I am only a bill and I am sitting here on Capitol Hill, but I hope to be a law one day, oh, yes I know that I will, but today I am still just a bill”), it is awfully hard to make a law in this country.

In the spring of 1981 Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman sat for weeks at a long table in room H-228 of the Capitol, his beady eyes peering over stacks of thick, black 3-ring binders containing the detail on most every federal program.

Stockman was holding over budget negotiations with his former colleagues in the House of Representatives. His mission was to cut spending, cut taxes, increase defense, and help his President, Ronald Reagan, usher in a new era of smaller, limited government, entrepreneurial innovation, individual freedom, and global prestige.

Piece of cake.

Few if any at the table, maybe with the exception of Jack Kemp, knew they were making history at the time. But they were, in the same way congressional leaders did for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal and McKinley’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s regimes of political and regulatory reforms.